Operating systems are often required to interface with secure environments to implement general computing operations. These secure environments are generally platform-specific and vendor proprietary. To make use of these secure environments, it is necessary to use a platform-specific secure service protocol as an interface between the operating system and the secure environment. Typically, most proprietary interfaces implement an isolated interface with a secure environment and are restricted to a monolithic service such as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), secure variables or graphics mini-ports. Such interfaces are often found lacking in flexibility to support arbitrary services and fail to address quality of service or security issues that typically arise with an open, extensible operating system.
Moreover, the use of monolithic proprietary interfaces often requires specialized programming code to be integrated with the high level operating system. Any changes implemented to the operating system will subsequently require changes to the specialized programming code of each monolithic proprietary interface.